1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to tools for allowing a Website content provider the ability to channel visitors to an active Website by use of activity messages on a real-time basis.
2. Description of the Related Art
An important feature of Website management is the ability to track user (visitor) activity and behavior patterns with respect to a Website and to graphically display this information (using color coding, annotations, etc.) on the site map. Prior methods that deal with this problem include U.S. Pat. No. 6,144,962 that uses an action tracker plug-in, which gathers user activity data by retrieving and analyzing server log files commonly maintained by Web servers. Using this feature, a Webmaster can view site maps which graphically display such information such as the most frequently-accessed URLs, the most heavily traveled links and paths, and the most popular site entry and exit points. Such an ability for viewing information in the context of a site map greatly simplifies the task of evaluating and maintaining Website effectiveness. Another example of this method is taught in U.S. Pat. No. 5,732,218 which teaches an information network of clients and servers. A service management system of a server gathers data from the server and from the clients for managing an information service Information management data is gathered on a client by extensions to a browser and is periodically reported to the service management system.
Standard Web servers commonly maintain server access log files (“log files”) which include information about accesses to the Website by users. These files are typically maintained in one of two standard formats: the HTTP Server Access Log File format, or the HTTP Server Referrer Log File format. Both of these formats are commonly used by Web servers available from Microsoft, Netscape, and NSCA, and both formats are supported by Astra. Each entry (line) in a log file represents a successful access to the associated Website, and contains various information about the access event. This information normally includes: the path to the accessed URL, an identifier of the user (typically in the form of an IP address), and the date and time of the access. Each log file stored on a physical server typically represents some window of time, such as one month and is not used in concurrent activity by a Web user.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,182,097 (hereinafter referred to as '097 patent) entitled “Method for characterizing and visualizing patterns of usage of a Website by network users,” which is hereby incorporated by reference, also teaches a system for displaying information pertaining to the usage of Web pages. This system comprises first and second Websites. The first Website comprises plural Web-component files, each having a name in a Website directory. The second Website comprises plural statistics files, each containing usage information about a corresponding Web-component file or subdirectory of Web-component files. The '097 system further comprises a computing device that has a display screen which is operable by a user, and is in communication with the first and second Websites. The computing device is operated under the control of Web-browser software effective for displaying, on the screen, Web components of the respective Websites. The '097 computing device is effective for requesting and retrieving, from either of the Websites, data that correspond to user-designated Web components, and it is effective for directing a data request to either of the Websites in response to user-designation of a Web-component from the other Website. However, in these current Web environments, there is no way to know of the real-time activity on these Websites. Although these above-mentioned ways of logging visits to a particular Website are now commonplace, the ability to log activity on a real-time basis is not currently achieved. Current log files provide no more than a history of what a user has viewed. No other information such as when they went to another Website or followed a link is captured by such methods. For many Website activities, such as online-discussions and e-conferences, there is a need to keep track of where users are on a particular Website, to allow a user to access information in a real-time setting for navigating to these activities. The invention tracks this information and avoids placing a burden on the user to install and download plug-ins or Web-components.